What is going on in New York? Anthony Weiner is a reprobate. He’s a pervert – an exhibitionist. He’s a liar. And he’s wildly arrogant about all of it. Why are New Yorkers even entertaining the idea that he might make a good mayor?

And what about the Missus? What’s the difference between this woman

and this woman?

They both swallowed their pride, accepted the unacceptable, and stood by their man. The first did so in order to secure her position and her political future.

Way back in 2010, Christine O’Donnell ran for the United States Senate for the State of Delaware. O’Donnell was a tea party favorite and became the target of some fantastic stories at the hand of her opponents.

One of those stories was about a tax lien on her home. It was alleged that she wasn’t all that bright and couldn’t manage her own finances. And to top it off she hadn’t paid her taxes. Why should such a person hold a position of authority? It didn’t matter that the lien was not real. She lost the race.

More information about that lien is trickling out now. O’Donnell recently got a call from an investigator at the Treasury Department to tell her that some official from the State of Delaware had accessed her tax records improperly. The date of that access was March 9, 2010.

Coincidentally, that was the same date that O’Donnell announced she was running for the Senate. Wow, small world, huh? But if that’s not enough for you, March 9, 2010 was also the date that the IRS placed the tax lien (for the home she no longer owned and didn’t owe any taxes on) into Ms. O’Donnell’s records.

What are the odds?

A Delaware official says the investigation into O’Donnell’s tax records was done properly, and says it was done on March 20, not March 9. But he can’t provide any evidence or additional information as all their records of the event have already been destroyed.

I’ll give you a minute for that one.

We’ve learned in recent months that the IRS has engaged in a systematic effort to use its power to undermine the most basic rights of conservative Americans by way of denying and delaying tax exempt status for any groups associated with conservative values. Now it appears the abuse runs deeper than we imagined.

Let’s engage in our own fantastic story for a moment. Fast forward a bit to the presidential race in 2016. Obamacare is in full swing and, as planned, the IRS has access to all our medical records. Their abuse of power continues unchecked.

The Republican Party has chosen Margaret O’Malley as their candidate. She’s a rock-solid conservative and the first female ever in such a position. With just weeks to go until Election Day, O’Malley is leading and looks headed to be the next President of The United States.

On an otherwise average Monday morning, the headline of the New York Times screams that O’Malley is mentally unstable. The story reveals that The Times has obtained a copy of her medical records showing her history of being institutionalized for depression and drug abuse. The associated criminal offenses are hinted at. There are also records of treatment for a variety of STDs and a listing of multiple abortions – from the pro-life candidate.

O’Malley steps to the microphones and claims innocence of each and every charge, but she is unable to overcome the media frenzy. She drops in the polls like a brick and is beaten by the Democrat Party candidate in a landslide. Her reputation is left in ruins.

A couple of months later, as the new president is about to be inaugurated, The Times prints a retraction in two tiny paragraphs on page 32, below the fold. They reveal that the IRS accidentally attached the medical records of another person to those of Ms. O’Malley. Oops. They still refuse to reveal the identity of the person who leaked O’Malley’s records to them. The Justice Department quietly drops the investigation.

Do you think that story is too fantastic? I don’t. I think it’s right where we are headed. Our government has been ruling against the wishes of the people for quite a long time already. And now they are shutting the door behind them. They are guaranteeing their power never be challenged by letting in only those who they trust.

Question them, challenge them or expose them and you’ll find the power they have claimed for themselves come down on you in a way you simply cannot defend. If they can’t find anything “usefull” to discredit an opponent, they will simply make it up. They’ve been doing it for years by way of innuendo. Now they simply have to turn to their pals, conveniently positioned in the maze of bureaucracy they have created, to obtain “real” evidence for whatever fantasy they require.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.”

And I would add that culture also determines the demise of a society.

So if a group wants to control a society, they need to control the culture. And how is that done? Do you go around telling people what to think, demanding they agree with you? Of course not. It has to be far more subtle than that. You have to persuade people to believe that your view is normal. And you do that by controlling the information that’s being disseminated to that society.

Right now, progressives are in control of virtually all our communication – television, movies, music and education. They have competition from talk radio and on the internet but average voters don’t go to these for their news. They get their information from the sources controlled by progressives.

Liberal, progressive, socialist and even occasionally communist ideals are supported in our entertainment. Prime time TV is filled with single mothers and gay and lesbian characters. Sex outside of marriage is routine. Abortion is treated as a tough but “right” decision. And environmental issues are sprinkled throughout. Conservative characters are included, but they are rigid and ignorant. They own guns, attend church and are usually older, white males. Devoted fathers take the biggest hit. Traditional values are ridiculed.

Movies have more leeway to expand all these and music goes even farther, glorifying cop-killers.

At school, our children learn early that Heather Has Two Mommies. They are taught right from the start all about global warming and how evil, rich people are destroying our planet. The United Nations is glorified while our own country’s flaws are put under a spotlight. History is altered. No mention of God is tolerated.

Now, I’ve thrown out a lot of issues here and you will have varying opinions on some or all of them. But that’s not the point. The point is normalization. You might disagree with some of these things. You may have been taught differently at home. But week after week, year after year, all this is presented as normal. If you disagree, the problem lies with you. The rest of the world thinks otherwise.

And once that is achieved, all that’s left is to assign blame. And that’s easy. No matter what your politics are, everyone knows the majority of our news media supports the progressives. That’s indisputable fact now. So anyone getting their news from the major networks or all but one of the cable news stations knows they are getting “news” that’s skewed to favor the left.

Subject matter is presented by these sources in strict terms – right or left, black or white, up or down. If you don’t believe in the theory of man-made global warming, you WANT dirty air and water. If you think Medicare needs to be reformed, you WANT old people to die. If you oppose gay marriage, you’re a homophobic bigot. If you oppose restrictions to the 2nd Amendment, you don’t care about children being killed at school. Pick your topic, it’s always the same.

And this is where the politics come in to play. Americans are divided into two simple groups – democrats and republicans. In this game, democrats are compassionate and care about others while republicans are mean-spirited and selfish.

What gets left out of all this is truth. This is theater and there is no basis in reality. It’s only about convincing people to think in the way that those in charge want them to think.

As the leader of today’s progressives, President Obama is highly skilled at navigating all this. He avoids traditional press conferences and the questions coming from White House reporters. Instead, he gives interviews to sources like Entertainment Tonight, The View, People Magazine and ESPN. He gets softball questions in these settings about superheroes and his favorite foods. He may get a couple of questions about serious issues, but his comments are never challenged. The viewer simply sees a nice guy who seems to care about them. Results of his policies are never examined.

But what’s most important here is that this is where our low information voters get their news. This is what makes them low information voters. It’s not a matter of intelligence, but what they are exposed to on a regular basis. Information is reduced to sound bites on Twitter or editorializing on Comedy Central.

Progressives have mastered this form of communication. This is why they have done so well in the last couple of elections. Conservatives have barely realized how they have been out-maneuvered and are trying to figure out how to catch up. Until they do, progressives control our culture by normalizing their politics, and thus are in control of our society.

American exceptionalism, the kind that put American astronauts on the Moon, is being replaced with mediocrity. Belief in a God of our choosing is being replaced with allegiance to the state. Self-reliance and personal responsibility are being replaced with dependence on that state.

The rights and liberties that my parents’ generation held so dear are threatened as Americans willingly give them away in exchange for a false promise of security or a government check.

I have faith in the people of America. I know they will awaken to what’s happening and reset our course. My concern is how much longer that awakening will take to come about and how much more damage is done in the meantime.

When we are very young, we are in awe of our parents. Mom and Dad know everything. They can do anything, and fix anything. They are our protectors and our heroes.

Around age 7 or 8 we begin to realize that they don’t know it all. There are chinks in the armor. By 13 they are a cross for us to bear. Had anyone seen my Mom singing and seat-dancing at the red light? Had they seen me in the car with her? What price would I pay at school tomorrow?

By 16, it’s clear that our parents are imbeciles. We’re amazed that they get through each day without serious injury. By 18 we soften our opinion a bit. We still know Mom and Dad are clueless, but it’s almost an endearing trait. They mean well, but after all, they’re old – at least 40! And we don’t really need them anymore, as we now know it all.

We go out into the world. We marry and have a few children. We get a mortgage, a car payment and perhaps a boss we don’t like that much. And with each passing year, our parents magically become smarter and smarter again. All that crazy stuff they told us all those years ago starts to make sense.

How the heck could we have been so wrong?

I’m told this pattern has repeated over and over with each generation. I’m pretty sure that’s true, though I must admit, I have but a small snapshot in time – my own life – on which to base that opinion. And I hate to be a navel-gazer, but I think my generation – the baby boomers – didn’t follow the pattern exactly and we’ve made quite a mess in the process. And that’s what I want to talk about.

The baby boomers are the 76 million of us born between 1946 and 1964. We started out as a pretty normal group.

Life was pretty good. We were the first to live in such large numbers in the new suburbia. We were far more affluent than previous generations. We had modern conveniences. We had cars. We had televisions. We had high quality education in brand new schools provided by the government.

We were a patriotic group. We were all concerned about the communists. I don’t remember them, but my older brothers recall the air raid drills at school. We were instructed to take cover under our desks in case of a nuclear attack.

Most of us attended Church regularly. Me and my brothers, and pretty much everyone else in my extended family, attended Catholic school. These were not expensive, private schools like they are today. We went because Mom and Dad were raising us with our religion and if you belonged to the parish, you were entitled to attend the parish school.

The TV was a great influence and the programming reinforced our patriotism, our religious beliefs and our moral values. We watched Howdy Doody, My Three Sons, Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. Thinking back, I was surrounded by adults who all taught and enforced the same lessons.

But that TV brought other things into our homes. As we moved through the 1960s we watched the unfolding of the civil rights movement. We saw the brutality and the bigotry. We watched the Viet Nam war on the evening news. The reporting changed as the mood of the country changed and the war became more and more unpopular.

One of my earliest memories of TV was watching President Kennedy’s funeral on the television in my 2nd grade classroom. I still recall the riderless horse with the boots backwards in the stirrups. I had never seen that before and that image is still etched in my mind.

That’s when I learned the word assassination. I was to hear that word again a few years later when Dr. King and President Kennedy’s brother Bobby were also murdered. Being so young and having nothing to compare to, this all seemed normal to me. I don’t think I knew I was living in such tumultuous times. And I credit Mom and Dad for that. They were still my protectors. Bad things might be happening in the world, but I was safe. They saw to that.

Ms. Phillips is a school volunteer who apparently told a school official she would smuggle in a gun and kill the governor. Haley was scheduled to speak at the school on Tuesday.

Phillips says she was joking and had no intention of carrying out the assassination.

She’s probably telling the truth. She probably wouldn’t actually commit murder. But she can’t help fantasizing about it. She’s just another example of tolerant liberals who support diversity, women and minorities.